Friday, 30 November 2012

Listen to the newborn infant’s cry in the hour of birth- see the death
struggles in the final hour- and then declare whether what begins and
ends in this way can be enjoyment.

True enough, we human
beings do everything as fast as possible to get away from these two
points, hurry as fast as possible to forget the birth-cry and change it
to delight in having given a being life. And when someone dies we
immediately say: Softly and gently he slipped away, death is a sleep, a
quiet sleep- something we do not say for the sake of the one who died,
for out talking cannot help him, but for our own sake, in order not to
lose any of the zest for life, in order to change everything to serve an
increase in the zest for life during the interval between the birth-cry
and the death-wail, between the mother’s shriek and the child’s
repetition of it, when the child at some time dies.

Imagine
somewhere a great and splendid hall where everything is done to produce
joy and merriment- but the entrance to this room is a nasty, muddy,
horrible stairway and it is impossible to pass without getting
disgustingly soiled, and admission is paid by prostituting oneself, and
when day dawns the merriment is over and all ends with one’s being
kicked out again- but the whole night through everything is done to keep
up and inflame the merriment and pleasure!

What is
reflection? Simply to reflect on these two questions: How did I get
into this and how do I get out of it again, how does it end?
What is thoughtlessness? To muster everything in order to drown all
this about entrance and exit in forgetfulness, to muster everything to
re-explain and explain away entrance and exit, lost in the
interval between the birth-cry and the repetition of this cry when the
one who is born expires in the death struggle.

Wednesday, 14 November 2012

A
few people have requested I put up a new post, as they were finding it
awkward/impossible to access all the comments on the last one.
Apparently, to read them all, you need to enable Javascript (thanks,
Laura!). Having nothing new to say, I shall merely bitch.

I
think the reason I loathe London so much is because it
smacks the fundamental mediocrity of humanity right in your face; there
is simply no escaping it. The bottom line is that most people are
mediocre, they really don't exist as thinking, self-aware creatures at
all. They suck up the shit dished out by their parents, the tabloids and
television and never have a thought in their lives. I don't mean this
in any Nietzschean Ubermensch crappy way, as I, too, am a mediocre,
loathsome, self-serving, morally delinquent specimen, but merely as a
sad statement of
inescapable truth. Living here would have extinguished any notions I
ever had about humanity if they hadn't all died a long
time ago, but even then, to come and live here in the midst of the flood
is something else altogether. I think that's why my fundamental feeling
these days is a great lassitude and weariness. Humanity is going
nowhere and accomplishing nothing; it's just pigs in a trough, and
that's being unfair on pigs, who are very clean animals.On Monday, circumstances forced me into
taking refuge in one of those awful 'Pret a Manger' chain cafes. I tried
to stick it out, but the awful food, the vapid music and the fake
cheeriness of the staff inspired a desire to commit a Brevik-style
massacre, so I ran out into the rain. That evening, while waiting for a Tube in one of the blandest of the bland London suburbs, I felt
close to fainting, such was the nausea induced by exhaustion and the
endless crowds of joyless, stone faced people all crammed on to the
Auschwitz cattle-cars that are the Underground. A
lot of my more 'optimistic' friends are those who still live in small
places, all frustrated and dreaming that
'civilisation' and 'culture' inhere in the big cities. Some even think I
am 'living the dream'. I try to disabuse them, but to no avail.There you are: humanity sucks!